“Perfect Timing (This Morning)” by Orba Squara spins as I write this. I was up at 5 A.M. to drop someone off at the airport in the rental. As I had a few extra hours before the car was due, I took a spin as far west as I could head – towards Golden Gate Park and the Pacific. Queen Wilhemina’s windmill and garden, an overcast sunrise, and soft tide Pacific awaited me.
I started from Fell Street, stopping and going past the gardens and bodies of water. Shadows of Hardly Strictly Bluegrass were on my mind, and I could feel myself tuck away plans for this October. The day was a gray shadow of the weekend before, dotted with the life of the homeless, the joggers, the bikers, and the passersby on occasion, lessening as I grew further from the city entrance and closer to the coast. I recalled bike rides with a New Zealand passenger I met on a train exactly five years before. I remembered the roses looked the same, but the sun warmed us on that day. I let myself be blanketed in green. I took a deep breath in and the Fugees version of “No Woman No Cry” spun as I wound towards the ocean.
Louie’s Restaurant was open, and I walked my cold, sandal exposed toes down the hill from the cliff where I parked. I sat facing the ocean, two tables back from a couple – she in sea green, he tall and white haired. It was barely seven A.M. and like crabs slowly coming out of the rocks, we all began to creep out. A short stack, scrambled eggs, and hot chocolate were in order. The Dixie Chicks version of “Landslide” joined me, having caught my thoughts tumbling over the curves of the cliff beside us and the hills across the ocean’s break into the bay.
I’d had a tourist staying with me, and I too got to spend San Francisco days as a tourist (a.k.a. a lot of time in Chinatown), but it was the water that I craved, in any form I could see her. She was quiet and sweet, awake all night long but not stumped by it – while I could barely take pre dawn wakings. My eyes lay heavy right now as I write this but they remember well the green layers that surrounded the start of the morning and how it showered in the park and came to shimmer from the ocean.
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